No more excuses: learn kanji with this online character mind map

Ever hit a brick wall when trying to study more kanji, with everything just feeling a bit... too unrelated (or way too much of the same)? Well, there's a new website/app on the block that's here to help.

Suiren ('water lily') is an online kanji guide built like a mind map, where you can search for a single kanji or word, and then see all the kanji related to what you searched for.

Think looking for the kanji for 'today' (今日), and then being led to related words such as this year (今年) or tonight (今晩), and further on to either dinner (晩ご飯) or strong (強い).

Hovering over a single kanji will highlight all the words in the mind map with that specific kanji in it, and if you click on a specific word, you'll find the reading (in hiragana) and a number of definitions in English. Ingenious.

Even better, whenever you look for the same kanji again, Suiren will pull a different mind map, meaning that you'll always find something new to memorise.

The entire thing was designed by Tokyo-based software engineer Marion Kamoike-Bouguet, with data pulled from the ever-fabulous jisho.org, an online Japanese-English dictionary.

Although it may be a little bit too much if you're just starting out, we're pretty sure Suiren will be of help if you already have some foundation and are looking to progress. We definitely wish we'd had this when we hit our first learning snag...

Kirsty is a staff writer for Time Out Tokyo. She spends her free time trying to not get hit by swerving taxis while cycling on an obnoxious orange mamachari. She avoids hashtags and loves latergrams (but despises the word). Follow her @bouwerskt.